Ernest Renan and Averroism: The Story of a Misinterpretation
My essay sets Ernest Renan’s famous study of Averroism, Averroès et l’averroïsme (first edition 1851) into the context of its author’s intellectual development. It shows how it can be seen in some respects as the precursor to his best-selling Vie de Jésus
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Ernest Renan and Averroism: The Story of a Misinterpretation John Marenbon
Ernest Renan described Averroism as ‘the story of an enormous misinterpretation.’ There is, then, some poetic justice in the fact that his own book on the subject, Averroès et l’averroïsme, has itself been misunderstood. Renan specialists in general give it no more than a passing mention, because it was written as a thesis and falls outside the field where he made his name, Old and New Testament history.1 Henriette Psichari, the editor of Renan’s collected works (and his grandson’s sisterin-law), does not even think the book worth a mention.2 There is one exception: Jules Chaix-Ruy has looked in detail at how Renan collected the sources for Averroism, and at his correspondence about the subject.3 But the links he draws between this book and Renan’s later work, though interesting, are very different
1 For example, Charles Chauvin, Renan (1823–1892) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2000) 4 lines on Averroès et l’averroïsme [AA] (p. 35); Henri Peyre, Renan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1969) 2 lines on AA (p. 14); Harold W. Wardman, Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography (London: Athlone Press, 1964) 3 lines on AA (p. 62); François Millepierres, La vie d’Ernest Renan, sage d’Occident (Paris: Rivière, 1961) 3 lines on AA (p. 199); Johannes Tielrooy, Ernest Renan, sa vie et ses œuvres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1958) AA not mentioned; Lewis F. Mott, Ernest Renan (London: Appleby, 1923) 3 lines on AA, emphasizing the cost of printing it; Jean Pommier (Renan d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Perrin, 1923) dedicates a paragraph to AA (pp. 94–95), where he finds links with Renan’s crisis of faith, his trip to Italy and the play, Caliban, which he went on to write). 2 Henriette Psichari, Renan d’après lui-même (Paris: Plon, 1937). 3 Jules Chaix-Ruy, ‘“L’Averroès” d’Ernest Renan’, Annales de l’Institut d’études orientales, 8 (1949–50), pp. 5–60; Ernest Renan (Paris: Vitte, 1956), pp. 152–179. Chaix-Ruy concentrates on themes in Averroès’s philosophy that Renan, he believes, adopted into his own thought, and on Renan’s view that the story of Islamic civilization shows what happens when religious faith succeeds finally in stifling philosophical speculation.
J. Marenbon (*) Trinity College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, CB2 1TQ, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni (eds.), Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 211, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_14, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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from those that will be explored here. By contrast with its lack of impact on studies of Renan himself, Averroès et l’averroïsme has cast a long shadow over medievalists, and it has been discussed quite frequently by those interested in Averroism.4 But the notion of Averroism which subsequent historians have developed, criticised and, more recently, rejected is not, as it ma
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